This kind of thing is actually a common Washington
(DC) manouver called a "trial balloon". If the
president's staffers have an idea they aren't sure
about, they leak it to see what the pundits and
the customers, um, I mean, the campaign contributors
react. If people hate it, then they deny that it
was ever a serious proposal in the first place.
If people really hate it then they deny
even having discussed such a disgraceful thing.
If they like it, everyone competes to pretend he
or she thought of the idea in the first place.
Alan Cox doesn't need to look at who puts food on
the table, because he puts his own food on his own
table. Any number of Red Hat competitors would be
happy to compete with each other to hire him. And
if Red Hat's managers are such idiots that Cox's
remark could cause him to lose (not "loose") his
job, well, then they deserve to lose him (clue:
they aren't).
If you, on the other hand, think so little of yourself as to believe that you must put up with a boss you don't like, I'm sorry for you.
Oh, nonsense. He was at a university,,allegedly
a center of learning. A good one would applaud
him for his initiative: capturing otherwise wasted
resources for purposes of advancing scientific research. If there were some reason that the
screensavers caused a problem, then the right response would be to ask the guy to uninstall the screen savers.
jd apparently does not understand that trademarks
protect adjectives, not nouns. "Crayon" is not
a generic name for a certain type of computer
program: the trademark holder has a trademark for
a computer program named Crayon, not for the word
Crayon. If Suse tried to contend that "crayon"
as the name of a computer program has entered the
public domain, they would be laughed out of court.
The concept you're confused about has to do with,
say, Kleenex becoming a generic name for a facial
tissue ("a kleenex"). This concept has gotten
confused further by the DNS issues: before the domain name
fights, it was clearer that you can't own a word,
only certain applications of that word ("apple"
as the name of a computer is owned by one company,
"apple" as the name of a record company by another).
People need to know that if you write a clone of
a program, and the program's name is not a generic
name for the type of program in question (like
"graph" for a graphing program), it's not legitimate to name your program just by putting
a K or a G in front of the other program's name.
So, "killustrator" would be a clear loser if ever
taken to court, because even though Illustrator
is a word, it is not a generic term describing a
vector-graphics drawing program, and furthermore
it will be easy to show that the name is not a
coincidence, that the namer intends to suggest
a relationship between the two programs.
Similarly, the FSF might well have a case against
a proprietary program that uses GNU in its name:
even though it hasn't formerly registered GNU,
it's been using it as a mark for a long time in
business (the FSF sells CDs, tapes, etc) and
it is a widely recognized and respected name.
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead.
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
The technology in question doesn't just kill
enemy soldiers, it kills large numbers of civilians.
Targeting technology is getting so good that
more than half the weapons now hit their intended
targets, but the problem is that the intelligence
information used to select the intended target is often wrong
(e.g. the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; villages
in Afganistan that were mistakenly believed to be
enemy).
If soldiers stay far from the action and destroy
targets remotely, they are less likely to be hurt
but are more likely to accidentally kill civilians
because they're too far away to notice mistakes.
There's a moral implication to this when, based
on results, we value one US soldier's life as
equal to, say, a thousand lives of noncombatants.
The way this has been coped with so far is to
cover up civilian deaths and convince the press
to do so as well (when reputable sources like the
UN or a respected aid organization reports that
a misdirected bomb killed a hundred or more civilians, the Pentagon denies and the US press
reports that it "cannot be confirmed", despite
the presence of credible and neutral eyewitnesses).
CNN won't call something "confirmed" until the
Pentagon confirms it.
Slashdot seems to tolerate the posting in full
of articles from other sites, even though doing
so denies the original site the ad revenue from
the page views that would otherwise go to it.
So it's not only copyright violation, it's likely
to really piss people off. I'd hate to lose
Slashdot as a resource, which could happen when
some hostile party demonstrates that this is a
repeated pattern.
But some people may not be registered, you say.
Yes, and Salon charges $30/year for their premium
service. I know, let's cut and paste all their
good articles so that people don't have to pay...
and so the site goes broke.
The worst part is that copyright violators get
rewarded with good karma. This is backwards,
these people are endangering Slashdot itself.
As if Slashdot never tries to rig one of these
"polls" -- pointing one out and urging people to
vote in a particular way.
Anyway, the real story is that Microsoft's software
leaks information out of corporations that may be
damaging to the reputations of its users, and then
even Microsoft itself can't control this.
Businesses often get burned by this in Word,
where earlier deleted text is still in the file.
In the mid-80s, 9-track tape was pretty much
the standard medium used to archive data.
That's what Henry Spencer used, for example,
to save the Usenet traffic of the 80s.
I wonder how much history will be lost as all
these tapes become unreadable.
Don't forget that Flash runs on Linux and Macs
as well. With a little smarts, folks can write
cross-platform viruses (if Flash can create a
script file and arrange to have it executed by
the user who is running the browser).
Anyone know whether the Linux Flash plugin
is vulnerable to this attack?
Salon's main source of revenue is now subscriptions.
The page hits just get you to the line that says
"Want to read more? Subscribe now", ideally just
when it starts to get interesting.
There aren't any Linux viruses in circulation at
present, so there's nothing to protect against.
The few Linux viruses that do exist seem to have
been created as exercises to prove that it can
be done, but they are not "in the wild".
Linux worms, however, do exist and can be very
dangerous. The difference between a virus and
a worm is that, to get a virus you have to somehow run a program that you've received;
worms attack over the network using known vulnerabilities. (There are many more worms for
Windows, e.g. Code Red).
The way to protect
against them is not with an anti-virus program
(that would be useless), but by keeping current
with the security updates for your distribution.
The anti-virus companies would dearly love to
add to their business by convincing Linux users
that we need their services. Just say no;
their approach is not to fix the problem, but
to just give you a list of "known criminals"
that they can spot. Anti-virus software is
useless against a new virus; this means you have
to keep going back to your pusher, um, your
anti-virus company, for updates. Actually
improving security would be bad for business.
If the only thing that these guys can claim to have invented is the concept that, if the disk is full, the least-priority previously recorded program is deleted, how can they claim that such an invention is such a blindingly brilliant contribution to the world
as to merit patent protection?
This point has evidently been missed because most
of you are too young to remember. The large population of identical boxes isn't what makes open source possible; it's what makes closed source
(proprietary binary-only software) possible.
The root of open source and free software as it
exists today is Unix (even though it was not open
source), and in particular the notion of a portable
operating system, together with the C language.
Back in the 80s, there was a huge diversity of
machines running some flavor of Unix, with about
a dozen different instruction sets and 50-odd
distinct Unix-based or Unix-like operating systems
in use. For most of these, there were simply too
few machines to justify the sale of more than a
few applications optimized to that particular
machine. The result was that folks needed to
learn how to program portably and needed to
distribute source code. In many cases the license
terms did not correspond to what we now call
open source (one common licensing scheme was the
single sentence "do whatever you want with this
as long as you don't take my name off or try to
make money with it"). And there were a number
of "gated community" projects (you paid a company
to get a source license, and you could compile it
yourself).
Possibly the most significant program Larry Wall
wrote in the old days was Configure -- he pretty
much invented the concept of querying the system
to obtain a portable set of #defines that would
then allow the program to be built on many platforms. The original one asked the user too
many questions that it could have figured out for
itself, but is was chatty and witty and would
insult your OS if Larry didn't like it. But in
any case the point was that if a program didn't
come with source, the users would not be able to
use it in all probability, there were too many
different machines. Proprietary apps that cost
tens of thousands could be sold to those with
mainframes or maybe Vaxes, but there was no
possibility of a mass market. It was Usenet
that drove the culture, though, especially
the netnews software itself, which was the first
example most folks saw of extremely portable
C code. My first free software work was the
contribution of a port of the 2.11B news software
to an obscure Unix-on-top-of-VMS thingie called
Eunice (Larry Wall's Configure had a specific
insult if it figured out that you were running
Eunice, something about a foul, musty stink).
Without this pre-existing free software culture
in place, mass market machines like the Apple II
and the IBM PC would not have produced it;
there would have been no need. What would have
happened in its absence, if machines got cheaper
without converging on one architecture, would be
that we'd all be using something like the BSD
ports setup: a binary package would be useless,
you'd have to download source and compile it
locally, using "make world" to keep up to date.
But it still could have worked.
If Apple's patent is valid, nothing put out by the
PNG group infringes. However, when an application,
say, Mozilla, displays a PNG in front of some
other graphic and uses the PNG's alpha mask to do
partial transparency, that would infringe.
Similarly, when a Gnome or KDE desktop displays
a PNG icon and uses the partial transparency to
have a smooth and not a jagged edge, that
would infringe. But just storing the alpha mask
in the file doesn't collide with anything in the
patent.
In practice, there's so much prior art that the
patent will be dead meat once it hits a court.
Traditionally, the patent holder deals with this
by licensing for a fee small enough that it's
cheaper to pay than fight, and in this case,
perhaps giving an out to the free software folks,
while possibly trying to get a bit of cash from
others. But in this case, I suspect that even
that strategy is not going to work.
It is proper for us to reject Microsoft's attempt
to keep its bugs secret. But this means that we
must also reject Alan Cox's attempt to protest the
DMCA by withholding discussion of security holes
in Linux, under his false belief that the DMCA
somehow forbids such discussion. We need to openly
discuss our bugs. Otherwise we are, in effect,
supporting Microsoft in their effort to stifle
discussion.
Yes, the DMCA is a bad law, but it's not infinitely bad.
It does not forbid discussion of bugs or circulation of patches for bugs; claims otherwise
are based on confused readings.
Anyone who's followed Alan Cox for a while would
laugh at the notion that Alan could be a Red Hat
puppet. The day he has a falling out with Red Hat,
he'll instantly get a substantial amount of money
from some other company. If anything, Alan's
involvement in a company that has to support users
makes him a better judge of many things than someone
in Linus's more isolated position.
If Red Hat is pushing a particular technical
direction for Linux, it's quite likely that the
reason for the push is because of the expert
opinions of the many kernel hackers that work for
them as to which code is mature enough to support.
But Hammel is perfectly correct when he says that
Linux was bult by hackers, for hackers. You
presumably object because you're thinking of the
popular meaning of "hackers", rather than the historical meaning, which was pretty close to the
phrase you want to substitute: "software enthusiasts".
Re:Which releases are production stable?
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 2
If Linus shipped the kernel, it's not production.
If Alan did, and it doesn't have an -ac after it, it's production.
If you want to run Evolution in a fetchmail
environment, it's no problem: when you set up
your account, set "server type" to "Standard
Unix mbox spools". You can then use Evolution
in the same way that you use elm or mutt.
For "Sending Email" choose "Sendmail". You
can then read and send mail offline and it will
queue.
One nuisance, though: I use procmail to sort
my mail into separate mailboxes. It seems the
only way to get Evolution to work smoothly with
this setup is to pretend that each of these
mailboxes is a separate account. I'd rather
have better support for this mode of operation
(which lets me continue to use either Evolution
or elm).
You write:
At that time [of the Crusades] almost all Christians were Catholic.
No, by this time the Christian world was split
into eastern and western halves, and there was
a lot of hostility between the Catholic and
Orthodox worlds. When the Crusaders got to
Palestine they found lots of Christians there,
but these were Orthodox Christians and the
Crusaders rejected them. They went on to sack
Constantinople, headquarters of Eastern Christianity.
The FSF's interpretation of the GPL is irrelevant for any purposes except passing interest.
Not correct: if the FSF is copyright holder,
and tells you "We believe that the GPL permits
XYZ" then XYZ is permitted, even if a judge's
reading of the GPL comes out different. This
is because the copyright holder is free to
grant extra permissions.
Further, if the FSF says "We believe XYZ is not
permitted and we'll fight you in court", you'd
better either give in, try to convince them
otherwise, or pay $$$ to hire lawyers.
It seems to me that the only feasible attacks
concern interpretation. The FSF says that the
GPL does not permit action X, some lawyer says
that the GPL does permit action X. So
someone might try to come up with a clever
scheme to use GPLed software in a proprietary
program by some trick, and get a judge to bless
it, thereby creating a loophole in the GPL.
It is because the FSF fears this kind of thing
that they are prepared to issue GPL version 3,
to fix any technicalities that lawyers try to
turn into loopholes. That's why the preferred
license is "GPL version 2 or any later version"
and not "GPL version 2" -- it allows GPL version
3 code to link with older GPLed code. To bad Linus
had a paranoia attack and rejected this (he
pushed for dropping "or any later version"
because he got paranoid about what RMS might do).
If your story is correct, the FSF does indeed
have standing to sue, as much of libc5 is
based on glibc version 1. Even though that is
LGPL, anyone Microtest gives the binary to may demand the source to
the library, plus any modifications to the
library.
And they probably have at least a couple
programs from GNU fileutils or shellutils in
there.
Konqueror does a much better job than Netscape
4.x of doing styles right, and it's a lot faster
than Mozilla. I wish the Mozilla people well,
but it's simply false to claim that the slowness
is required for a correct implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of thing is actually a common Washington (DC) manouver called a "trial balloon". If the president's staffers have an idea they aren't sure about, they leak it to see what the pundits and the customers, um, I mean, the campaign contributors react. If people hate it, then they deny that it was ever a serious proposal in the first place. If people really hate it then they deny even having discussed such a disgraceful thing. If they like it, everyone competes to pretend he or she thought of the idea in the first place.
Alan Cox doesn't need to look at who puts food on the table, because he puts his own food on his own table. Any number of Red Hat competitors would be happy to compete with each other to hire him. And if Red Hat's managers are such idiots that Cox's remark could cause him to lose (not "loose") his job, well, then they deserve to lose him (clue: they aren't).
If you, on the other hand, think so little of yourself as to believe that you must put up with a boss you don't like, I'm sorry for you.
Oh, nonsense. He was at a university, ,allegedly
a center of learning. A good one would applaud
him for his initiative: capturing otherwise wasted
resources for purposes of advancing scientific research. If there were some reason that the
screensavers caused a problem, then the right response would be to ask the guy to uninstall the screen savers.
jd apparently does not understand that trademarks protect adjectives, not nouns. "Crayon" is not a generic name for a certain type of computer program: the trademark holder has a trademark for a computer program named Crayon, not for the word Crayon. If Suse tried to contend that "crayon" as the name of a computer program has entered the public domain, they would be laughed out of court. The concept you're confused about has to do with, say, Kleenex becoming a generic name for a facial tissue ("a kleenex"). This concept has gotten confused further by the DNS issues: before the domain name fights, it was clearer that you can't own a word, only certain applications of that word ("apple" as the name of a computer is owned by one company, "apple" as the name of a record company by another).
People need to know that if you write a clone of a program, and the program's name is not a generic name for the type of program in question (like "graph" for a graphing program), it's not legitimate to name your program just by putting a K or a G in front of the other program's name. So, "killustrator" would be a clear loser if ever taken to court, because even though Illustrator is a word, it is not a generic term describing a vector-graphics drawing program, and furthermore it will be easy to show that the name is not a coincidence, that the namer intends to suggest a relationship between the two programs.
Similarly, the FSF might well have a case against a proprietary program that uses GNU in its name: even though it hasn't formerly registered GNU, it's been using it as a mark for a long time in business (the FSF sells CDs, tapes, etc) and it is a widely recognized and respected name.
The technology in question doesn't just kill enemy soldiers, it kills large numbers of civilians. Targeting technology is getting so good that more than half the weapons now hit their intended targets, but the problem is that the intelligence information used to select the intended target is often wrong (e.g. the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; villages in Afganistan that were mistakenly believed to be enemy).
If soldiers stay far from the action and destroy targets remotely, they are less likely to be hurt but are more likely to accidentally kill civilians because they're too far away to notice mistakes. There's a moral implication to this when, based on results, we value one US soldier's life as equal to, say, a thousand lives of noncombatants. The way this has been coped with so far is to cover up civilian deaths and convince the press to do so as well (when reputable sources like the UN or a respected aid organization reports that a misdirected bomb killed a hundred or more civilians, the Pentagon denies and the US press reports that it "cannot be confirmed", despite the presence of credible and neutral eyewitnesses). CNN won't call something "confirmed" until the Pentagon confirms it.
Slashdot seems to tolerate the posting in full of articles from other sites, even though doing so denies the original site the ad revenue from the page views that would otherwise go to it. So it's not only copyright violation, it's likely to really piss people off. I'd hate to lose Slashdot as a resource, which could happen when some hostile party demonstrates that this is a repeated pattern.
But some people may not be registered, you say. Yes, and Salon charges $30/year for their premium service. I know, let's cut and paste all their good articles so that people don't have to pay ...
and so the site goes broke.
The worst part is that copyright violators get rewarded with good karma. This is backwards, these people are endangering Slashdot itself.
As if Slashdot never tries to rig one of these "polls" -- pointing one out and urging people to vote in a particular way.
Anyway, the real story is that Microsoft's software leaks information out of corporations that may be damaging to the reputations of its users, and then even Microsoft itself can't control this. Businesses often get burned by this in Word, where earlier deleted text is still in the file.
In the mid-80s, 9-track tape was pretty much the standard medium used to archive data. That's what Henry Spencer used, for example, to save the Usenet traffic of the 80s. I wonder how much history will be lost as all these tapes become unreadable.
Don't forget that Flash runs on Linux and Macs as well. With a little smarts, folks can write cross-platform viruses (if Flash can create a script file and arrange to have it executed by the user who is running the browser).
Anyone know whether the Linux Flash plugin is vulnerable to this attack?
Salon's main source of revenue is now subscriptions.
The page hits just get you to the line that says
"Want to read more? Subscribe now", ideally just
when it starts to get interesting.
There aren't any Linux viruses in circulation at
present, so there's nothing to protect against.
The few Linux viruses that do exist seem to have
been created as exercises to prove that it can
be done, but they are not "in the wild".
Linux worms, however, do exist and can be very
dangerous. The difference between a virus and
a worm is that, to get a virus you have to somehow run a program that you've received;
worms attack over the network using known vulnerabilities. (There are many more worms for
Windows, e.g. Code Red).
The way to protect
against them is not with an anti-virus program
(that would be useless), but by keeping current
with the security updates for your distribution.
The anti-virus companies would dearly love to
add to their business by convincing Linux users
that we need their services. Just say no;
their approach is not to fix the problem, but
to just give you a list of "known criminals"
that they can spot. Anti-virus software is
useless against a new virus; this means you have
to keep going back to your pusher, um, your
anti-virus company, for updates. Actually
improving security would be bad for business.
If the only thing that these guys can claim to have invented is the concept that, if the disk is full, the least-priority previously recorded program is deleted, how can they claim that such an invention is such a blindingly brilliant contribution to the world as to merit patent protection?
You don't have to carry your own mass to throw out
the back. The sun provides that too, which is
how solar sails work.
This point has evidently been missed because most of you are too young to remember. The large population of identical boxes isn't what makes open source possible; it's what makes closed source (proprietary binary-only software) possible. The root of open source and free software as it exists today is Unix (even though it was not open source), and in particular the notion of a portable operating system, together with the C language.
Back in the 80s, there was a huge diversity of machines running some flavor of Unix, with about a dozen different instruction sets and 50-odd distinct Unix-based or Unix-like operating systems in use. For most of these, there were simply too few machines to justify the sale of more than a few applications optimized to that particular machine. The result was that folks needed to learn how to program portably and needed to distribute source code. In many cases the license terms did not correspond to what we now call open source (one common licensing scheme was the single sentence "do whatever you want with this as long as you don't take my name off or try to make money with it"). And there were a number of "gated community" projects (you paid a company to get a source license, and you could compile it yourself).
Possibly the most significant program Larry Wall wrote in the old days was Configure -- he pretty much invented the concept of querying the system to obtain a portable set of #defines that would then allow the program to be built on many platforms. The original one asked the user too many questions that it could have figured out for itself, but is was chatty and witty and would insult your OS if Larry didn't like it. But in any case the point was that if a program didn't come with source, the users would not be able to use it in all probability, there were too many different machines. Proprietary apps that cost tens of thousands could be sold to those with mainframes or maybe Vaxes, but there was no possibility of a mass market. It was Usenet that drove the culture, though, especially the netnews software itself, which was the first example most folks saw of extremely portable C code. My first free software work was the contribution of a port of the 2.11B news software to an obscure Unix-on-top-of-VMS thingie called Eunice (Larry Wall's Configure had a specific insult if it figured out that you were running Eunice, something about a foul, musty stink).
Without this pre-existing free software culture in place, mass market machines like the Apple II and the IBM PC would not have produced it; there would have been no need. What would have happened in its absence, if machines got cheaper without converging on one architecture, would be that we'd all be using something like the BSD ports setup: a binary package would be useless, you'd have to download source and compile it locally, using "make world" to keep up to date. But it still could have worked.
If Apple's patent is valid, nothing put out by the PNG group infringes. However, when an application, say, Mozilla, displays a PNG in front of some other graphic and uses the PNG's alpha mask to do partial transparency, that would infringe. Similarly, when a Gnome or KDE desktop displays a PNG icon and uses the partial transparency to have a smooth and not a jagged edge, that would infringe. But just storing the alpha mask in the file doesn't collide with anything in the patent.
In practice, there's so much prior art that the patent will be dead meat once it hits a court. Traditionally, the patent holder deals with this by licensing for a fee small enough that it's cheaper to pay than fight, and in this case, perhaps giving an out to the free software folks, while possibly trying to get a bit of cash from others. But in this case, I suspect that even that strategy is not going to work.
It is proper for us to reject Microsoft's attempt to keep its bugs secret. But this means that we must also reject Alan Cox's attempt to protest the DMCA by withholding discussion of security holes in Linux, under his false belief that the DMCA somehow forbids such discussion. We need to openly discuss our bugs. Otherwise we are, in effect, supporting Microsoft in their effort to stifle discussion.
Yes, the DMCA is a bad law, but it's not infinitely bad. It does not forbid discussion of bugs or circulation of patches for bugs; claims otherwise are based on confused readings.
Anyone who's followed Alan Cox for a while would laugh at the notion that Alan could be a Red Hat puppet. The day he has a falling out with Red Hat, he'll instantly get a substantial amount of money from some other company. If anything, Alan's involvement in a company that has to support users makes him a better judge of many things than someone in Linus's more isolated position.
If Red Hat is pushing a particular technical direction for Linux, it's quite likely that the reason for the push is because of the expert opinions of the many kernel hackers that work for them as to which code is mature enough to support.
But Hammel is perfectly correct when he says that Linux was bult by hackers, for hackers. You presumably object because you're thinking of the popular meaning of "hackers", rather than the historical meaning, which was pretty close to the phrase you want to substitute: "software enthusiasts".
If Linus shipped the kernel, it's not production.
If Alan did, and it doesn't have an -ac after it, it's production.
If you want to run Evolution in a fetchmail environment, it's no problem: when you set up your account, set "server type" to "Standard Unix mbox spools". You can then use Evolution in the same way that you use elm or mutt. For "Sending Email" choose "Sendmail". You can then read and send mail offline and it will queue.
One nuisance, though: I use procmail to sort my mail into separate mailboxes. It seems the only way to get Evolution to work smoothly with this setup is to pretend that each of these mailboxes is a separate account. I'd rather have better support for this mode of operation (which lets me continue to use either Evolution or elm).
At that time [of the Crusades] almost all Christians were Catholic.
No, by this time the Christian world was split
into eastern and western halves, and there was
a lot of hostility between the Catholic and
Orthodox worlds. When the Crusaders got to
Palestine they found lots of Christians there,
but these were Orthodox Christians and the
Crusaders rejected them. They went on to sack
Constantinople, headquarters of Eastern Christianity.
Not correct: if the FSF is copyright holder, and tells you "We believe that the GPL permits XYZ" then XYZ is permitted, even if a judge's reading of the GPL comes out different. This is because the copyright holder is free to grant extra permissions.
Further, if the FSF says "We believe XYZ is not permitted and we'll fight you in court", you'd better either give in, try to convince them otherwise, or pay $$$ to hire lawyers.
It seems to me that the only feasible attacks concern interpretation. The FSF says that the GPL does not permit action X, some lawyer says that the GPL does permit action X. So someone might try to come up with a clever scheme to use GPLed software in a proprietary program by some trick, and get a judge to bless it, thereby creating a loophole in the GPL.
It is because the FSF fears this kind of thing that they are prepared to issue GPL version 3, to fix any technicalities that lawyers try to turn into loopholes. That's why the preferred license is "GPL version 2 or any later version" and not "GPL version 2" -- it allows GPL version 3 code to link with older GPLed code. To bad Linus had a paranoia attack and rejected this (he pushed for dropping "or any later version" because he got paranoid about what RMS might do).
If your story is correct, the FSF does indeed have standing to sue, as much of libc5 is based on glibc version 1. Even though that is LGPL, anyone Microtest gives the binary to may demand the source to the library, plus any modifications to the library.
And they probably have at least a couple programs from GNU fileutils or shellutils in there.
Konqueror does a much better job than Netscape
4.x of doing styles right, and it's a lot faster
than Mozilla. I wish the Mozilla people well,
but it's simply false to claim that the slowness
is required for a correct implementation.